EVENT 17/08/07 TASMANIAN LIVING ARTIST WEEK
Sidewalk Tribal Gallery is once again pleased to participate in Tasmanian Living Artists Week and presents
Far From Home:
Recent Arrivals, Their Culture
Featuring anonymous artisans from villages in Sudan, Ethiopia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Liberia and other disrupted communities.
We at Sidewalk Tribal Gallery invite you and your friends to join us as we celebrate the ethnic and cultural diversity of some of our new Tasmanians.
As a participating gallery supporting Tasmanian Living Artists’ Week we hope that you and your friends will jump off the bus on Friday night to enjoy the sounds of Africa surrounded by an amazing selection of traditional art from the cultures of some of our recent immigrants.
Friday August 24 from 6 - 8pm
Enjoy the sounds of Africa with a performance of traditional music by
Fabio Chivhanda, master musician from Zimbabwe
View either the invite, or our latest flyer as PDFs.
Refugees are forced to flee their homelands
with very few possessions, but their history and culture lives on with
them in whichever place they may be dispatched to.
During recent years Tasmania has seen many new arrivals from different
African locations. We see them, we meet them and we hear their amazing
stories of survival but few of us have the opportunity to learn about
their history or see their cultural objects and traditional art.
This exhibition focuses on the art and ancient traditions of some
African cultures represented among our recent immigrants with an attempt
to promote greater understanding of the history and wealth of heritage
that all migrant people add to our multicultural society.
In many African languages there is no word for art while the words for
power and beauty are often the same or similar. African art is both
powerful and beautiful.
It has evolved with humanity to protect, teach and record history, to
comfort, to empower utilitarian objects and to help explain the
mysteries of life and mankind.
This exhibition also includes work from many other parts of Africa along
with a spectacular collection of old ethnic jewellery and textiles
collected from around the globe.
While our new arrivals are happy to be in a peaceful country they miss
their homelands and African life style. We would like to welcome them
all and wish them a happy and fruitful stay as so many of their
countrymen have welcomed us in the countries we visit across Africa.
EVENT UPDATE 17/05/07 MELBOURNE EXHIBITION 2007
Invites for Far from Home: Recent Arrivals, Their Culture, are now on their way to the printers, and should be mailed out next week. For a preview or to download one if you aren't on our mail list click here.
We are pleased to announce that Ajak Kwai will be performing in Melbourne at the opening of the exhibition.
Born in the small town of Bor in the Malakal Region of the Upper Nile, Ajak grew up in a musical family and began singing at village ceremonies and celebrations, learning the songs of her heritage. In 1992, Ajak was forced to leave her home and went to college in Egypt spending the next 8 years in exile in Cairo. Under the UN Humanitarian Aid program, Ajak was accepted to migrate to Australia in 1999.
In 2002, Ajak started performing at various festivals in Australia. In May 2004, Ajak produced her demo CD Why not Peace & Love?
Ajak sings in her native Dinka as well as in Arabic and English. Her deeply philosophical and global concerns are expressed in her heartfelt songs about freedom, peace, love, marriage, and ... cows, the source of Dinka life. Her performing style has great appeal, both visually and musically. She is unique and wherever she performs it leaves her audience spellbound. www.ajakkwai.com
EVENT UPDATE 09/05/07 Melbourne Exhibition 2007
Far from Home
Recent Arrivals, Their Culture
11th annual touring exhibition of African Tribal Art from Timbuctoo to Tasmania presented by Sidewalk Tribal Gallery, Hobart
Opens for preview 10am Thursday June 14th
Official opening 6 - 8pm
Last day Thursday June 28th
Glen Eira City Council Gallery
Cnr Glen Eira and Hawthorn Roads, Caulfield
Monday–Friday 10am– 5pm
Weekends and public holidays 1pm–5pm
Refugees are forced to flee their homelands with very few
possessions, but their history and culture lives on with them in
whichever place they may be dispatched to.
During recent years Australia has seen many new arrivals from countries
across Africa. We see them, we meet them and we hear their amazing
stories of survival but few of us have the opportunity to learn about
their history or see their cultural objects and traditional art.
This exhibition focuses on the art and ancient traditions of some
African
cultures represented among our recent immigrants with an attempt to
promote greater community understanding of the history and wealth of
heritage that all migrant people add to our 'multicultural society'.
The works are created by skilled artisans: carvers, weavers and smiths
who often inherit their role working in their traditional village to
produce pieces for ceremonial, religious and utilitarian function.
In many African languages there is no word for art while the words
for
power and beauty are often the same or similar. African art is both
powerful and beautiful.
It has evolved with humanity to protect, teach and record history, to
comfort, to empower utilitarian objects and to help explain the
mysteries of life and mankind.
This exhibition also includes work from many other parts of Africa along
with a spectacular collection of old ethnic jewellery and textiles
collected
from around the Globe
Since 1989 the Sidewalk Tribal Gallery collection has become
internationally recognised for its quality and variety of African Tribal
Arts.
The gallery has built a reputation for its honest and fair dealings with
the villagers and traders across Africa and is also acknowledged and
respected for this practice among international collectors.
Download more information here.
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1. Dinka staff, wood, brass inserts, Sudan. |
EVENT: 20/04/07 Tasmanian Living Artists WEEK
Sidewalk Tribal Gallery is proud to present Far from Home: Recent Arrivals, Their Culture, as part of the 2007 Tasmanian Living Artist Week [TLAW] organised by arts@work in Tasmania. TLAW runs from August 24 to September 2.
Focusing on the art & traditions of African cultures represented in our recent migrants: an attempt to promate greater community understanding of the history & culture that Africans bring to our 'muticultural society'.
Far from Home: Recent Arrivals, Their Culture features the work of anonymous artisans from villages in Sudan, Ethiopia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Liberia and other African nations.
Download more information here. [You will need the Adobe Acrobat Reader]
Mukyeem mask, One of 3 masks relating
to creation narratives of the Kuba people, DR Congo.
H: 55 x W: 45x D: 45cm Wood, shell, beads & vegetable fibre.
NEWS: 15/04/07 Sydney GAllery Now Closed
Our Sydney gallery at 1/1 Danks St has now closed its doors for the last time. Again we'd like to thank everyone who has visited.
Our Hobart gallery will of course still be open, and as always will be stocked full of wonderfull artefacts from Africa, tribal and ethnic jewellery from all over the world as well as an array of textiles from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.
Don't forget our ebay store, where you can browse, bid and purchase a selection of our stock, and that we have images of some artefacts and jewellery @ flickr.com. This website will also be undergoing a serious revamp over the next month or two. Soon you'll be able to browse and enquire about our complete inventory.
EVENT: 07/04/07 Drawing Life
A joint exhibition from the teacher and her student -
Bunty Houston & Stephen
Mallick
on Sunday April 15 from 2 - 5
with an opening address at 3pm presented by acclaimed Tasmanian artist
Simon Cuthbert
Exhibition continues from Tuesday until Saturday from 10 - 5pm until May
25
Sidewalk Tribal Gallery, 19-21 Castray Esplanade, Battery Pt.
Ordnance Store Building opposite the CSIRO
Click here to download a PDF of the invite.
Click here to download a PDF of the exhibition catalogue
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Bunty Houston: ‘Supplicants’
Charcoal drawing on paper
H: 60cm W: 79cm. |
Stephen Mallick: ‘Abandoned’
(detail), Charcoal drawing on paper
H: 41cm W: 58.5cm |
Drawing Life
Drawing from life performs many functions: it can be an exercise in
skill, a discipline for the eye, hand and mind, a careful rendering of
the visible, or a preparation for something else, perhaps a painting.
For children, it is always an expression of what they are feeling more
than a desire to record what they see. For many adults, too, drawing
from life can be all of these things. It is an act of exploration, a
relating of many parts, a visceral connection with the real, a sure
point in a bewildering flux. A good drawing is unmistakable, not least
to the artist. It is that moment when a small piece of what is within
finds a concrete form, a form which speaks to others. It is a small
miracle, and worth celebrating. Bunty Houston, now in her 90’s,
began her official life as an artist relatively late. When she found her
voice, through her drawing, she produced an amazing amount of the very
highest quality work over a glorious period of thirty years. Her work is
mostly of the figure, direct from life, or when not actually in front of
the model informed through a profound understanding of the human form
through her dedicated life drawing practice. Her line is unmistakable -
urgent, powerful and authoritative. Her images are memorable,
unforgettable, as the important, often painful events in life are
unforgettable. As a teacher, Bunty melded her powerful example, creative
instruction and artistic integrity to inspire and encourage a legion of
dedicated and appreciative students. Stephen Mallick encountered Bunty
towards the end of her active drawing career, and the event has been
decisive. A natural draftsman in his turn, Stephen’s work and
drawing practice attest to the powerful influence of his teacher,
evident in the power of line, strong form, and in the urgency and
vitality communicated in the work. For Stephen, as for Bunty, drawing
from life remains a central and all important activity: a discipline, a
release, and a need.
Opening June 14 from 6 to 8pm and continuing till June 28,
Mon-Fri 10 to 5, Sat-Sun 1 to 5.
We are pleased to announce the dates for our 2007 exhibition in Melbourne at the Glen Eira City Council Gallery, Caulfield Town Hall, cnr of Glen Eira & Hawthorn Rds, Caulfield, Melbourne.
This year will mark the 11th time we have exhibited in Melbourne. To receive an invite to the opening of this exhibition email Ann with either your postal address or email address
NEWS: 14/01/07 Sidewalk Tribal GAllery - Sydney Closing
It is with some sadness that we announce the closing of our Sydney gallery. We would like to express our thanks and gratitude to everyone who has visited the gallery in Sydney. Of course our Hobart gallery will continue to open as ever.
Luke is moving on, with work in the IT and web development, unfortunately we haven't been able to find staff with a wide enough and deep enough appreciation of the beauty, origins, and history of African art.
Sunday April 15 will be the last day we are open.
Now don't despair as not all is bleak for lovers of African art outside of Hobart. Our presence on the internet is growing we have a store @ ebay African Art at Timbuctu to Tasmania and images of some of our amazing pieces can be browsed on Flickr, the image sharing site, Sidewalk Tribal Galleries - Flickr.
Additionally you can look forward to a surprising revamp of the sidewalkgalllery.com.au web-site, which will launch in time for our annual Melbourne travelling exhibition. On our updated site you will be able to browse all stock in our inventory, complete with descriptions and large images. So check back here soon.
News: 02/05/06 Melbourne invite
Pictured below is our invite for our Melbourne 2006 exhibition, they should be in the mail, to members of our mail list, next week. Alternately if you are not on the mailing list or a just very keen, you can click on the image to see both sides of the invite.
note: you must have Adobe Acrobat Reader installed on your computer, if you do not have it click here, and then click on the Adobe link.
Event: 01/02/06 Melbourne 2006
A Triptych of Ethnic
& Tribal Art from Timbuctoo to Tasmania
African Tribal Art and Sculpture.
Textile Art and Jewellery from the Hmong, Dao, and Co-Tu People of
Vietnam.
Ethnic Jewellery - an international collection
Glen Eira City Council Gallery
Caulfield Town Hall
Cnr. Glen Eira & Hawthorn Rds
t: 03 6224 0331 or 03 9524 3402
Opens on Thursday May 18 2006, 6 - 8pm with preview from 10am
Continues until 1st June
Mon - Fri 10-5
Sat - Sun 1-5
Event: 30/11/05 updated 16/12/05
Parallel exhibitions - Sidewalk Tribal Gallery: Sydney and Alexandra & Leigh Copeland
The opening of our next exhibition, Textile Art from the Hmong, Dao, and Co-Tu People of Vietnam, at our Sydney gallery will be in conjunction with Alexandra & Leigh Copeland, with their exhibition to be titled TRIBAL CARPETS & TEXTILES from Central Asia and Baluchistan. They will be exhibiting at Depot 2 Gallery at 2 Danks St, Waterloo [across the road from us]. Both exhibitions will open February 1st.
Alexandra and Leigh Copeland have been collectors and dealers in traditional and antique textiles since 1972. They specialise in Central Asian textiles and antique flatweaves. The Australian National gallery and the National Gallery of Victoria have significant collections acquired from the Copelands. The Powerhouse Museum has acquired several pieces.
Here is some more information about their exhibition . And some more information about their show here.
To be notified of more information about these upcoming exhibitions why not sign up for our mailing list click here for more information about how to subscribe.
Download a copy of our Textile Art from the Hmong, Dao, and Co-Tu People of Vietnam flyer here
NEWS: 30/11/05
Opening times over the
new year.
Our Hobart gallery will be closed on
Christmas day, Boxing day, and New Years day [25th and 26th of December
and 1st of January, respectively]. Our Sydney
gallery will be closed from 3:00 pm on December 24th and reopen at
10:00am on January 10th.
NEWS: 27/11/05
We have now updated our links page. So far we have included only a small selection of our favourite sites, more will be added soon. If you have a suggestion for a site that you think we should link to, email Luke.
The links page can be accessed by clicking here, or click on the Links button in the navigation bar above.
NEWS: 25/11/2005
We have updated our references page!
We are pleased to announce that Sidewalk Tribal Gallery is now an affiliate of abebooks.com. This means that when you click on the link beside a book on our references page a new window will open, showing available copies of that title.
Abebooks is the world's leading online marketplace for books. Whether it's new used rare or out-of-print, you can find it there. They have a community of over 13,000 independent booksellers with 70 million books from around the globe.
We have used Abebooks for some time now to find rare and out of print second hand titles and have found the service of the booksellers we have dealt with to be great. We suggest that when ordering more than one book you try to get them all from one dealer as this reduces shipping costs, alas it is not always possible.
Alternately you can enter a search term into the search box below or at the bottom of the references page.
| Our exhibition of hill tribe costumes, titled Textile Art from the Hmong, Dao & Co-Tu People of Vietnam begins in Hobart on December 4th and will run through till the 23 of January. Following that show, it will travel to Sydney for an exhibition opening in early February. |  |
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NEWS: 17/11/2005
Our VoIP number in Sydney is now active and you can contact Luke there on 02 9029 1184.
NEWS: 05/11/2005
We have recently changed our ISP to iinet our Hobart gallery now has a VoIP telephone number, 03 6294 6208. If you are an iinet customer, with iinetphone enabled, you can now call us for for free from anywhere in Australia. We will soon have the same service available in our Sydney gallery.
NEWS: 01/11/2005
Just in time for Christmas our Sydney gallery has been restocked with a shipment of jewellery, artefacts and craft. Drop in and see what we have in store.
Also our web site is finally receiving some attention. Drop by and check it out as we will be updating it regularly from now on. In the meantime, until we have more images and information, if you have any enquiries about artefacts, jewellery or textiles, email us on one of the links to the left and we'll be able to send you pictures of anything we have in stock.
EVENT: 01/11/2005
We are currently working on putting together a fabulous exhibition of Vietnamese hill tribe costumes, both old and new. This exhibition will hopefully be in conjunction with Leigh and Alexandra Copeland who deal in tribal rugs, and will be exhibiting in the Danks Street Depot, at 2 Danks Street. All things going well, the shows will open in late January 2006.
Old news [pre 1st November 2005]
To reflect our gradual change in focus over the years we have decided to change the name of our Hobart store to match that of our Sydney location. So from now on Hobart is also to be called Sidewalk Tribal Gallery, and as a whole the business will be named Sidewalk Tribal Galleries.
We invite you and your friends to join us at Sidewalk Tribal Gallery (Hobart) as we celebrate Tasmanian Living Artist week with 2 performances from our Tasmanian African community recreating the atmosphere of African life surrounded by art from many different cultures across Africa
On Friday August 26th from 6-8pm
Loro Emmanuel will play his traditional Adungo harp from Sudan
followed by
Sunday August 28th between 2pm - 4pm
Fabio Chivhanda playing the 22 key traditional Mbira from Zimbabwe.
click here for more information.
As a participating gallery supporting Tasmanian Living Artist Week we hope that you and your friends will jump off the bus on Friday night or drop in on Sunday afternoon to celebrate the ethnic and cultural diversity of some of our new Tasmanian performing artists in an environment that reflects their homelands, their other life, their culture and history.
To find out more about the Tasmanian Living Artists Week, and the Gallery Crawl click here, or click here for a PDF of the bus timetables
Maps of Africa
Thanks to all the people who came along to see
Dolls, Hats and Funny Money in either
Hobart, Melbourne or Sydney. The response has been fantastic.
While many of the objects have sold, some of them are still available
for viewing and sale at both our Hobart and Sydney galleries.
You can either download the newsletter or click here for more information.
| Our fourth newsletter, titled Dolls, Hats and Funny Money is now available for download.
There are two versions, one high resolution for broadband users, and a
lower resolution one for dialup users. For high resolution click here. For low resolution click here. if your browser is configured with the Acrobat Viewer plugin you can simply left click on the link and it will display in the same window, alternately you can right click and choose "Save As" or similar, to download the file to your computer. |
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Hobart
Our Hobart
store continues to be stocked with a spectacular range of artefacts,
textiles, jewellery, and craft.
Mail List
If you'd like
to join our mailing list [or change your details or remove yourself]
send us an email by clicking here.
Recommended
references
We'd also like
to take the time to congratulate Christopher D. Roy, Professor of
African Art at the The School of Art and Art History, University of
Iowa, for his continued, sterling works in West Africa. Chris has been
traveling and living in West Africa for over 30 years. He has performed
a vital role in documenting and explaining the cultures of West Africa,
particularly Burkina Faso. His web site Art and Life in Africa Project is a wealth of knowledge and well
worth a look. He has filmed masquerades and traditional crafting
techniques in situ. We play his collection of DVDs in our Hobart store,
these attract much attention. In the time we have been traveling in West
Africa we have heard nothing but respect for "Mister Chris"
and are constantly asked whether we have met him, to our loss we have to
say no; although he was in Ghana during our trip in 2002. Another
resource for wonderful images of the Dogon and Lobi is www.lobi-dogon.ch We also would like to recommend two fantastic
ethnological texts written by two of today’s leading Africanists.
The Children of Woot, A History of the Kuba Peoples by Jan Vansina,
details the complex kingdom that is the Kuba who live in The Democratic
Republic of The Congo. The second book The Great lakes of Africa: Two
Thousand Years of History by Jean-Pierre Chrétien discusses the
lakes region of central and eastern Africa, countries in this region
include DR Congo, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, and Tanzania. Both books are
a little dry, with no pictures, but they are well worth the effort.
Newsletter Archive
Get PDFs of
our previous newsletters.
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| Newsletter 01 Tribes of Tanzania. Download here. |
Newsletter 02 Makonde and other related tribes of Mozambique. Download high resolution here or low resolution here. |
Newsletter 03 Collecting African Artefacts. Download here. |
Since its
inception in 1989 Sidewalk Gallery has become a world renowned Tribal
Arts Gallery. Specialising in Antique & Traditional African
Sculpture representing more than 85 separate cultures collected from 26
countries across Africa.
Ethnic jewellery and other items of adornment , both antique &
contemporary, from every continent continues to astound all who enter
the gallery.
The collection is spectacular.
Bunty Houston
Together
Supplicants
Spooked
Reclining Figures I
Reclining Figures II
Pensive
Mother with Child
Monumental Figure
Messianic
M's Feet
Jury
It's Like This
Family Party
Deshabille
Stephen Mallick
Who Is It Can Tell Me Who I Am
Warming Up
Street Figures
Stoic
Sam's Move
Paul
Maternal
Cuddling
Daytime TV
Bunty's Legs i
Bunty's Legs ii
Afternoon Nap (Waking)
Abandoned
